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The Mountains of the Night

by Bruce Taylor

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Chapter One

For Faith Is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want

and seemingly, that's the way it was for the first fourteen years of my life. Mountains of the Night? What? In Seattle, just two mountain ranges to satisfy my new love of hiking in my early teen years: on the east, the Cascades, and to the west, the Olympics. And suddenly, August, 1962, at age fourteen, a new mountain range -- a range that made the Himalayas, the Andes, much less the Cascades and Olympics -- utterly insignificant: The Mountains -- of the Night.

August, 1962. I was devastated. After some weeks of falling asleep almost at any time, excessive thirst, weight loss, my mother became concerned. My grandmother, who came to visit every few months, had diabetes, and we had on hand her supplies for testing sugar in urine. My mother had me turn over a sample of urine. Five drops urine, ten drops water into a test tube. Drop in a Clinitest tablet that boils the solution. Wait. The solution turned from blue to green and then to orange and finally a brownish orange -- a high amount of sugar in the urine. I screamed, "No, no, no! No! Not me! NO!" Shrieking, I ran through the house, ran outside and sobbed by the garden pool with the family cat, Flak, paws on my leg looking up at me in curiosity.

The next day, sitting in the doctor's office, the verdict was confirmed. The doctor, an older man, glasses, graying hair, tried to be professional, but kind, "Your blood sugar was 560 -- you're going to have to be on insulin injections. Being diabetic isn't so terrible, you can lead a perfectly normal life."

Insulin injections. Measured food. Urine tests. Insulin shock. Potential blindness, kidney failure, heart disease. Labeled a disease instead of a person. Hiking? My new love of hiking? Incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

A normal life?

Age fourteen. And all I knew was that a "normal life" and the potential for a normal life had been destroyed. And I did not know the nature of the Mountains of the Night that had suddenly risen before me: what was the nature of the violent upthrust of DNA rock, environmental stone, that had arisen in massive black summits before me? The future, an impenetrable wall of fear, uncertainty, disease, early decay, early death. It was over. Over.

Yet, even in my despair and misery, I heard a whisper from the Mountains of the Night, a wind from those black canyons, those bleak summits, those dark divides, freezing plateaus. I couldn't understand the message then, but looking back on it, the words were: "Come. Come. Come into my darkness. There is a trail here that you must tread. Be not afraid. Come. For the only other choice you have is death, not of disease, but of Spirit. Come. Travel this trail through the darkness. Come. Come and know me. And through this, you shall come to know courage and nobility. And on the altar of God, Time, Earth, Stone and Eternity, you shall know your place. And in this place of torment, terror and fear, you shall receive a gift. Come. Come into my darkness."

With my first injection of insulin, I took my first step on that trail to the Mountains of the Night.

 

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